The Shaughnessy Report: Showing Some Constraint
Elementary, Mr. Watson: Rein in Your Design Constraints
Target Condition: Are Autorouters Friend or Foe?
Trending at Freedom CAD: New Crop of Next‐Gen Designers
March 20, 2015 | Barry Matties, I-Connect007Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Scott McCurdy, director of sales and marketing at Freedom CAD Services, expresses his vision for what North America is bringing to the table in the world of circuit design. I‐Connect007 Publisher Barry Matties and McCurdy also discuss China, trends in product design, tools, and more.
Barry Matties: Tell me a little bit about Freedom CAD. What does the company do, exactly?
Scott McCurdy: Freedom CAD is one of the largest printed circuit design engineering service bureaus in North America. We’re primarily known for PCB layout which is where we have the largest number of our employees, with about thirty layout designers. We also go upstream as well, with electrical engineers doing hardware design. The EE guys (electrical/electronics engineers) work from the customer’s block diagram sketch to create the digital schematic; then we’ll do the layout.
But we also go in the other direction: When we get the opportunity with our customers, we can provide prototype assemblies. We manage the projects, working with a few select partners for PCB fabrication, component kitting, and assembly houses. We’re really only dealing with prototypes builds, but it’s that entire cradle‐to‐grave span that we can provide to our customer, to take them from the sketch pad to the working PCB assembly.
We’re basically providing the engineering that will ultimately turn into a circuit board.
Matties: You’ve been at this for how long?
McCurdy: I have been at it for a few years. I got started in 1968 and opened a little printed circuit board shop with my dad.
Matties: McCurdy Circuits?
McCurdy: Yes. Dad got it off and running and a decade later I took over the company and over the following 20+ years grew it to $33 million. Then came the cataclysmic event of 2001. Lots of headstones in the PCB fabricators graveyard! McCurdy Circuits was one of them. I stumbled into the IPC Designers Council. All of a sudden, my eyes opened up that the design side of this business was a great place for my previous fab skills.
I’ve been the president of the Orange County Chapter of the IPC Designers Council since 2003 and really enjoy being able to bring designers and fabricators together. This way we can learn more about what each other is doing and actually create some reality out of that term “DFM.”
Matties: Is your customer base primarily in the U.S., or are you in the global market?
McCurdy: We do very little outside of North America. There are a lot of our customers who are designing and engineering in the States but they’re building it somewhere else. That’s just the way it is today, but they do appreciate the mindshare of same time zones, and we’ve got designers in 13 states and British Columbia, so we’re scattered all over the country. There is the comfort level of talking in the same language and being in close time zones and cultures and things like that. Not that we don’t feel that there are other parts of the world that are making a great contribution to this interconnect industry, we’re just primarily North America—that is our main customer base.
Matties: One of the things that I’m hearing is that China is really coming on strong in the design sector.Page 1 of 2
Share on:
Suggested Items
Digital Twin Concept in Copper Electroplating Process Performance
07/11/2025 | Aga Franczak, Robrecht Belis, Elsyca N.V.PCB manufacturing involves transforming a design into a physical board while meeting specific requirements. Understanding these design specifications is crucial, as they directly impact the PCB's fabrication process, performance, and yield rate. One key design specification is copper thieving—the addition of “dummy” pads across the surface that are plated along with the features designed on the outer layers. The purpose of the process is to provide a uniform distribution of copper across the outer layers to make the plating current density and plating in the holes more uniform.
Meet the Author Podcast: Martyn Gaudion Unpacks the Secrets of High-Speed PCB Design
07/10/2025 | I-Connect007In this special Meet the Author episode of the On the Line with… podcast, Nolan Johnson sits down with Martyn Gaudion, signal integrity expert, managing director of Polar Instruments, and three-time author in I-Connect007’s popular The Printed Circuit Designer’s Guide to... series.
Showing Some Constraint: Design007 Magazine July 2025
07/10/2025 | I-Connect007 Editorial TeamA robust design constraint strategy balances dozens of electrical and manufacturing trade-offs. This month, we focus on design constraints—the requirements, challenges, and best practices for setting up the right constraint strategy.
The Shaughnessy Report: Showing Some Constraint
07/14/2025 | Andy Shaughnessy -- Column: The Shaughnessy ReportWhen we first decided to cover strategies for setting PCB design constraints, one designer we spoke with said, “They’re not really constraints; they’re more like guardrails that prevent your design from going off a cliff.”
Elementary, Mr. Watson: Rein in Your Design Constraints
07/10/2025 | John Watson -- Column: Elementary, Mr. WatsonI remember the long hours spent at the light table, carefully laying down black tape to shape each trace, cutting and aligning pads with surgical precision on sheets of Mylar. I often went home with nicks on my fingers from the X-Acto knives and bits of tape all over me. It was as much an art form as it was an engineering task—tactile and methodical, requiring the patience of a sculptor. A lot has changed in PCB design over the years.